When that was done, she sat and waited while the Dragon analysed the telemetry streams, picking through the faint whispers and flickers of electromagnetic radiation for some unexpected signal.
Bored after two days of finding nothing, she jumped as deep in-system as she dared to go, then powered towards the system's single inhabited planet on reaction drive. The world was advanced enough to put communications satellites into orbit and fire a few probes towards the edges of the system, but there were no orbiting ships of any significance and nothing in the electromagnetic noise that spilled off the planet to suggest the inhabitants knew anything about wider galactic affairs. This was a nascent civilisation, teetering on the brink of discovering the technology needed for metaspace travel, teetering also on the edge of environmental collapse and military conflagration. Perhaps, if Ondo's golden age really had existed, a world such as this would have been guided towards the stars, gently shown how to take the final leap. That wasn't going to happen now.
She wasn't sure if she felt sorry for the population on the planet or if she envied them. They were locked in endless petty concerns, fighting small battles of no great significance, oblivious. But they also had no knowledge of Concordance, didn't know what awaited them if they did work out the technology required to traverse metaspace. They were tantalisingly close to making the breakthroughs: a few insights, some new ways of thinking from theoretical physicists and mathematicians, and they'd be there.
It would be a moment of triumph – and disaster. They wouldn't even need to build a viable ship; the acquisition of the necessary knowledge would be enough for Concordance. The Augurs would intervene immediately, and the planet's first experience of contact with other intelligence would be one of oppression and subjugation. They, too, would become used to the sight of a Cathedral ship in orbit, and of messages and instructions and threats handed down from the sky.
For now, they were ignorant, like children unaware of the burdens and agonies of adulthood. Except, as was clear from their broadcasts, they were not children. There was beauty and miraculous achievement there, but there was also atrocity and agony and horror. They were people like her people had been: surprising, inspiring, terrifying, sometimes all at once.
This close, she also detected one anomaly: a halo of nanosensors in orbit around the planet. They were dark, receiving rather than transmitting, and were almost certainly undetectable to the planet's technology. They weren't Ondo's; they had to be Concordance devices, presumably for monitoring the messages of the embedded Void Walkers on the ground. From their inactivity, it appeared they had no clue she was there. Nor would the planet: the Dragon's technology was easily capable of concealing it from any watchers on the surface.
She couldn't resist doing what she did next. She was drifting in space twenty light-seconds from the planet. Its night side was turned towards her, a spattering of artificial lights visible on high magnification. There was a high probability no one would notice: the planet had some telescopes monitoring distant stars and deep space, but they were purely scientific instruments. The people on the planet did not routinely monitor local space. Why would they?
Ondo didn't have to know anything about it. First, she needed to check with the Dragon.
“How much of what I do does Ondo get to hear about?”
“As much or as little as you wish. You are in command.”
“What I'm about to do, it's best he doesn't hear of it.”
“I understand. What are your orders?”
It was a small thing. She'd been thinking about all the people down there, billions and billions of them, living out their little lives. “I want to send a signal to the planet. Nothing overt, nothing that gives anything away. But a clue. A series of flashes in the visible spectrum that follows a sequence any civilisation will recognize. Let's use numbers where each is the sum of the previous two, up to, say, thirteen. Then we'll repeat the whole thing once.”
She thought the Dragon would refuse, but instead it said, “How bright?”
“Enough to be visible to the naked eye should anyone happening to be looking at our precise point in the sky but dim enough to not attract wider attention.”
“Can I ask the purpose?”
“An acknowledgement. A connection. I don't know. Planets like this have lost so much too, in their own way.”
When it was done, they resumed their stuttering dance around the periphery of the system to pick up nanosensor telemetry.
It took her a week to detect the anomaly, and, in the end, she nearly missed it. It was the briefest dimming of light of the background stars, but it was no simple off/on. It was a complex pattern, as if some intervening object were tumbling through space. It was probably nothing: a ghostly object haunting the Oort cloud, the extended region of lumpy rock and ice on the outer edges of the system. Most likely, she'd witnessed the chance event of multiple objects eclipsing a star. Still, with nothing else to try, and bored with monitoring the broadcast output of the closed-off world, she went to investigate.
It rapidly became clear as she homed in on the coordinates she'd calculated that it was no mere lump of primordial rock. The shattered skeleton of a starship tumbled through the void, two-thirds of its structure sheared away, only the nose section and part of the lateral fuselage surviving. Some devastating force had burst it open, spilling its crew into the vacuum. It was certainly no Concordance ship; there was no weirdly twisting form to the ship, just the clean
